By Anil Raturi (Retd IPS)
“Brain rot” is the Oxford University Press’s phrase of the year for 2024.
The phrase was selected by thousands of online voters.
The Oxford Dictionary defines ” brain rot” as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially as a result of consuming too much trivial or unchallenging material, particularly online content.”
The phrase can be traced back to Henry David Thoreau, who almost two centuries ago, first used it while criticising society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas that can be interpreted in multiple ways in favour of simple ones, and saw it as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Cristin Ellis, (teaches literature at the University of Mississippi), an authority on Thoreau, says that for Thoreau ‘brain-rot describes what happens to our minds and spirits when we suppress our innate instincts for curiosity and wonder and instead resign ourselves to the unreflective habits we observe all around us — habits of fitting in, getting by, chasing profits, chatting about the latest news’.
In the context of the contemporary youth (particularly “millennials” and generation thereafter) who seem to prefer engagement on social media over serious reading– a digitally induced vulnerability seems to be evolving, leading us towards the affliction now being termed as “brain rot”.
Different scholars studying human mental “attention span” have variously reported it to be anything from 8 to 15 minutes. The jury is still out on the issue. Notwithstanding, it is common knowledge that it takes a lot of mental training for a person to continuously be able to concentrate on the details of a topic or task. The more one exercises the mind the more this faculty grows. It is perhaps for this reason that all civilisations have by now accepted the efficacy of meditation. Deep reading too, is a form of meditation!
It is one thing to be abreast with technology and quite another to become a slave to it!
The downside of this slavery is fleeting concentration, short mental span, and onset of weakness of mental strength and discipline that steadily leads to an enervated mind.
Deep reading requires effort. It needs an ability to transcend the seduction of the “instant high” provided by doses of dopamine that social media addicts one to!
Books are a repository of not only knowledge but can also be a source of distilled wisdom of human civilisations. Variegated deep reading in due course instils growth in a person and can be a path to spiritual enlightenment!
But, a deep passion for real knowledge alone can drive and motivate human beings to sublimate the immediate short-term gratification of the frivolous “shallow type” of social media engagement. It is not surprising then, that in an age of Millennials and Gen Z, (that seems to be engrossed more in fleeting social media than in serious reading) the English vocabulary should come up with “brain rot” as the expression of this year!
Thoreau, an American transcendentalist, recommended emancipation from the slavery of “over civilization” – a connotation that decried carrying life to the extremes of dependence on technology!
Something that progressively erodes human physical and mental vitality! More seriously, it erodes the faculty of discretion emanating from the wisdom of every individual’s unique genius!
In pursuit of the principle, Thoreau lived for some time away from civilisation in solitude at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
He meticulously recorded his experience in his book ‘Walden’, an exercise experimenting upon human solitude. He attempted to live a life bereft of technology.
Thoreau may have made his point through exaggeration. However, the relevance of the concept in our lives can never really be overstated!
Incidentally, Thoreau was inspired by the “Gita” just as Mahatma Gandhi was by Thoreau!
(Anil Raturi is a retired IPS officer and former DGP, Uttarakhand)
